Speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting on Monday, Mr. Yildirim said the earlier statement identifying the attacker as a child was a “guess” based on witness accounts.
Advertisement
Most of the victims were children, media reports say.
A day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blamed a 12- 14-year-old child for a suicide attack at a Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep city, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım said Monday that officials can not verify if the perpetrator was a minor or an adult.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the attack on the Islamic State which, he said, “is trying to position and organize itself in Gaziantep”.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack but ISIS rarely claims attacks in Turkey, which analysts speculate to be because of its use of Turkey as a transit country to get foreign fighters into its self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria. Manbij city was freed from the Islamic State group a few weeks ago by a joint local force of the Kurdish YPG group and Arab groups, known as Syria Democratic Forces and supported by the USA air force.
In a sign of a key battle to come, Syrian rebel fighters have amassed on the Turkish side of the border in preparation for an offensive on the town of Jarablus, ISIL’s last major transit point on the Syrian side of the border.
Turkey vowed to “completely cleanse” Islamic State (IS) militants from its border region, after a suspected suicide bomber with links to the group killed 54 people, including 22 children, at a Kurdish wedding.
In the latest violence in Turkey’s south-east, two members of the Turkish security forces and five PKK militants were killed in clashes and attacks in the last 24 hours.
Despite the president’s assertion ISIS is responsible, yesterday Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim appeared to contradict those claims, saying it was “too early” to tell who masterminded the attack.
Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey would provide every kind of support needed to “cleanse” Turkey’s border with Syria of the extremists.
The bride and groom, who survived the bombing, urged authorities to act to prevent future bloodshed.
“We do not have a clue about who the perpetrators behind the attack were”.
Even before the attempted July 15 coup, Turkey had experienced a year of bloodshed and political turmoil, weathering a string of deadly bomb blasts, blamed variously on ISIS and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK. The Ankara bombing previous year was the deadliest of its kind in Turkey, killing more than 100 people.
Advertisement
“I can’t forget that moment”, she said, adding that she hasn’t been able to return to her house near the scene of the attack and was staying with her sister.
